10/27/2008 @ 6:00PM

In Pictures: Dead Celebrities' Body Parts

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ear Bones

Doctors eager to study Beethoven’s famous deafness decided to remove the composer’s auditory ossicles during his autopsy, but they were purloined by a medical orderly. Rumors quickly went around Vienna that the temporal bones had been sold to a “foreign doctor” for a princely sum. They have never turned up on the relic market, but parts of Beethoven’s skull, stolen when his body was exhumed in 1863, suddenly appeared in California in 2005. They had been passed down for generations by a Viennese family, but the new owner heroically decided to resist financial temptation (a lock of Beethoven’s hair, removed at the autopsy, sold for $7,300 in 1994) and donated them to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at California’s San Jose State University, where they now safely reside.